This optimal strategy seems to suggest the following intuition behind the theorem: our assumption of preparation noncontextuality on the input preparations \(P_a\) , \(P_b\)  imply that the distributions \(\mu _a(\lambda )\)  and \(\mu _b(\lambda )\)  overlap “too much” (formally, it implies maximal \(\psi \) -epistemicity, \(c_{ab} = \int _{S_b} d\lambda \mu _a(\lambda )\)  [1]}), hence the cloning performance turns out worse than in quantum mechanics. Furthermore, noncontextuality implies that \(\mu _a\)  and \(\mu _b\)  coincide on their overlap, which implies a direct relation between \(c_{ab}\)  and the \(\ell _1\)  norm \(\Vert  \mu _a - \mu _b\Vert \) . Crucially the latter cannot be increased by the cloning machine, since \(\Vert  \cdot \Vert \)  decreases under post-processing.
